Whilst Emily Took Her Nap
by julzbobbibroun
Summary: It was summer. They met in Europe. They fell in love. They're now dealing with the aftermath.


**Whilst Emily Took Her Nap**

_It was summer. They met in Europe. They fell in love. They're now dealing with the aftermath._

Pairings: Nate/Rory

Notes: Set during _Gilmore Girls_ season five and _Gossip Girl_ season three. Ages have been addled and timelines have been shifted to more closely match up.

This is something I started and couldn't be bothered to finish. I was going to add something about Serena's exploits in Europe including Logan, Colin and Finn as well as the van der Bilt polo match and Blair's interrogation at Golden Unicorn Restaurant but my lazy won out. I suppose you could view this as a snapshot in time. Anybody's welcome to pick it apart for their own purposes and/or finish it, themselves.

* * *

><p>Rory unhurriedly returned to the Gran Romano and her grandmother. It was mid-afternoon and she was in no rush. Her Grandma was in their room, taking the nap she always did this time of day. Rory was graciously left to experience more European culture at a faster and funkier pace. The concierge was right. Grandma would not have appreciated the catacombs.<p>

She wasn't alone on her meandering stroll. Rory's companion was not her grandmother. She was not, however, talking to him. She was on the phone to her mom at the insistent behest of the handsome brown-haired boy beside her. She knew he had a fair point. They couldn't really move forward with the weight of summer's start holding her down.

"Mom, I'm sorry."

_"__It's okay."_

"I screwed up." Rory clutched the cell phone in her hand like she was drowning and had snagged the last life raft. It wasn't hers and she didn't want to think of the large bill this transatlantic call could rack up, not that he'd care. Money seemed to be the opposite of an issue for him. He _had_ checked into the same hotels she was staying in, the same hotels that Emily Gilmore had booked.

Still, she felt it necessary to make this conversation short and sweet – an exceedingly difficult task for a Gilmore girl. "I screwed up so bad. I handled everything wrong."

_"__Oh, honey."_

"I keep reliving everything over and over. It's such a mess. I just wanna fix it. I have to fix it," she stated, desperate determination travelling strong through the receiver. She was gifted an encouraging smile from him.

_"__You will."_

"I know. I just," Rory's voice insecurely shrank, "I need a favour."

_"__Okay."_

She felt the need to explain, "It's big."

_"__Okay..."_ Lorelai drew out her response from the bench on the sunny porch of the Dragonfly Inn a whole ocean away, in Stars Hollow.

"I wrote a letter." Rory conspicuously paused. "To Dean." She halted again. "Could you get it to him?"

_"__Oh."_

Rory heard her mom's hesitancy. She had to make her understand. "I don't know how else to do it. I can't just mail it to his apartment." Her head lowered. She looked down at the ground. A strapping arm wrapped around her shoulders before she continued. "It's a big favour."

_"__Honey, I don't know."_

"It's a lot to ask, but I think that this will make everything better. Please. I can't wait till I get home. I have to do something now," nearly cried a fraught Rory.

_"__A letter, huh? Well, get it to me and I will get it to him."_

She was relieved at the calm assurance. "Thank you. Thank you." Her posture slackened. Rory hadn't realised that she had tensed enough to actually slacken anything. Her body relaxed and the guy walking alongside of her had noticed.

"You good?" the guy softly asked.

Nate didn't need to say this and they both were aware of that. Rory shyly smiled and nodded.

Their fulsome kindness was one of the fundamentals they had in common. They each went the extra mile out of their way to make the people around them happy. Nate was often manipulated because he was a trusting and forthcoming guy. Rory was pegged as an overly sensitive dormouse due to her above and beyond bending backwards to avoid hurting other's feelings. It was nice to share that with someone.

Ears sharp and attuned to the unfamiliar addition, Lorelai was quick on the uptake. Her tone shifted. It became lighter with a sizeable dollop of good humour. _"Who was that?"_

"Oh, erm, no one. Just, uh, a, um–" Rory was glad her mom wasn't in a position to see her face. It had turned very red. Nate, who was, had begun to laugh. Her mom would most definitely not be able to miss that, not be unable to put two and two together. She may have been on another continent but she was Lorelai Gilmore, for God's sake.

_"–__The _reason_ you have to do something now? A _male_ reason?"_ she teased.

Rory decided to concede. It was stupid to even consider hiding something, especially a boy-like something, from her mother. "Not the only reason, no."

_"__His name's not Randy, is it?"_

* * *

><p>Nate felt like a bit of a fool. No, fool was too inadequate of a description for him. He was an idiot. Nate had told Rory that he was going to Yale come the commencement of fall, where she went. He wasn't. He was, in fact, currently enrolled at Columbia. <em>Idiot!<em> He was a helplessly, hopelessly lovestruck idiot.

He was proud to have gotten into a good college on his own, without the help of his family. He had looked forward to avoiding a school where his legacy included an especially high concentration of polos and khakis who hated his father's guts. The last time Nate was there, he had planned to get blazed at a bar off campus. He wanted to be completely done with the place. At Yale, people knew who he was and all the stuff about his dad. Heck, an economy class there had painted his father as Michael Milken.

There was no escaping the drama on the Archibald front in New Haven. Going someplace where there was widespread awareness about him and the Captain wasn't a particularly attractive aspect of moving to Connecticut. Nate didn't exactly envision himself stripped down to his boxers and tied to a statue, like Dan Humphrey was when a group of guys had thought he was him, in the future.

Then again, Chuck did say that he had enough leverage to keep the pissed masses at bay by order of 'owning' the Skull and Bones, whatever that meant. Nate was happy with his ignorance. He was fine with his plausible deniability. How Chuck had managed to make that happen was a truth he didn't mind not knowing.

Nate was glad it wasn't the Life and Death Brigade that had gone after him. They wouldn't have left him to freeze his ass off late at night in a plain, old gazebo. They would've blindfolded him and pushed him out of a moving airplane, or something else as equally insane.

The Brigade had probably left him alone because he was a van der Bilt as well as an Archibald. Nate was quite certain his cousin Tripp was in the hushest-hushed of secret societies when he was an undergrad. He had been pretty sure that Tripp's sister, Stephanie, still was. Nate reckoned that generations of van der Bilts had littered its membership registry over the centuries.

His mother's side of the family practically owned Yale University. All William van der Bilt had to do to get Nate into the place was make a phone call. His grandfather had pushed for his attendance, deeming it the appropriate choice, as did his mom. Perhaps his latest decision would help drum up a touch of goodwill.

Nate had parted from Rory sooner than anticipated in Rome. He had taken an earlier flight and was on a helicopter to see Grandfather in Greenwich. See... drop by unexpectedly... uncharacteristically shanghai...

There had been neither a breath nor a whisper from the van der Bilt compound all summer long. He knew his family would be mad after he'd skipped out on the internship at the Mayor's office. He had gotten the silent treatment from them since he'd stirred stuff up. He had to rectify that. He needed a favour.

Nate knew he'd probably have to give the van der Bilts some measure of control over his life if he became indebted to them. He was aware that he'd likely end up selling part of his soul in the process. He wanted to be his own man but it'd be worth it. Rory was worth it.

* * *

><p>"Oh, we had such a trip," Emily enthused. "Rory will fill you in." She placed a hand on Rory's arm and didn't bother to hide what she had said next, "Spare her the more salacious aspects."<p>

"Salacious aspects?" Lorelai was unsure how she should have sounded in response to her mother's claims. Her hands were in her jean pockets. She stood uncomfortably in her kitchen.

Emily had turned back to her daughter. "Those European men, – young, old, in between – they saw us coming."

"They saw you coming where?" Sookie eyes had naively widened.

"We were like magnets," Emily smiled, self-satisfied. She stared into space, her mind momentarily lost. "Such high libidos."

Lorelai's expression was stony and held a little disgust. "You weren't walking around wearing your 'hot and wealthy' sandwich board, were you, Mom?" her voice dropped.

"She was very popular," Rory said lightly before she nonchalantly pursed her lips. The words came out of her mouth suspiciously fast in her mother's opinion.

"Not the only one. Right, kid?" Lorelai cheekily grinned.

Rory looked like a deer faced with quickly oncoming headlights. She minutely shook her head. Her panic was poorly disguised. Lorelai smirked at her daughter. It appeared that Emily knew nothing about the non-cultural tours of Europe her granddaughter had taken throughout their sojourns in Italy. It was fortunate that the eldest Gilmore in the room was too preoccupied reliving the 'salacious aspects' of her wondrous summer abroad to notice Lorelai's amusement and Rory's alarm.

* * *

><p>A pair of tall and handsome young men walked the warm streets of the Upper East Side. Summer had slowly started to give way to fall. However, autumn had a short while before its arrival.<p>

The two gents' attires had two things in common: they were stitched with designer labels and had cost a lot. That was where the similarities between their clothing choices reached an end. And, then, 'choice' would've been only a loosely used term for the more casually dressed party pounding the Manhattan pavement. His mother still shopped for his clothes. She still labelled them like he was a kid, and those labels were adorned with tiny anchor pictographs before his name.

One guy was impeccably kitted out in a sharp, double-breasted black suit. The other – the owner of the mommy-bought, anchor labelled apparel – was in fitted jeans and wore his blue-grey _Boss_ button-up with the sleeves carelessly shoved to his elbows.

As different as day and night, the opposites amiably discussed how each of them had spent their holidays.

"Let me get this straight. You practically stalked–"

"–_Followed_," Nate exasperatedly stated. He was smirked at. He wasn't sure whether he'd been humoured or teased by his best friend. "With_ permission_," he elaborated with resolute finality. "We exchanged numbers. I would ask the whereabouts of her next destination and she would tell me."

Chuck chuckled. "Right, Nathaniel. You 'followed' a girl throughout Europe–" he was cut off.

"–Just Italy. We met in Vienna, near the end of our trips."

"Uh huh. So, you spent over a fortnight following a girl around Italy and you don't even know her last name?" Chuck's eyebrows raised.

Nate shrugged. "Not my idea. It was hers."

"Why?" he asked slowly, as if Nate had spent the last week shut in his room smoking pot and playing Halo.

"She said it was incentive for her to sort out stuff back home as soon as possible," said Nate calmly. He had ignored Chuck's condescension-laden confusion.

Nate's face had scrunched with some confusion of his own. He had thought back to Rory's long, guilt-laden ramble about why she was travelling with her grandmother. "Or, something to that effect. I think." He scratched his head. "I'm pretty sure that's what she said. Rory used a lot of big words. She does that. She uses a lot of big words a lot of the time. She talks really fast too. It gets kinda confusing."

Chuck was greatly entertained with what Nathaniel had to say about the girl he had met in Italy so far. She'd sounded as if she were a hilariously coincidental blend of Blair _and_ Serena _and_ Nate, himself. She seemed like a surreally enchanting challenge to keep up with and Nate, totally taken with her, wasn't willing to walk away from his summer fling any time soon. More laughable stories were sure to come.

"Anyway, we agreed not to exchange surnames until she had everything squared away with her ex."

"That's stupid," Chuck pointed out.

"I thought Chuck Bass was a big fan of making deals and playing games."

"Not ones as lame as that."

Chuck had initially accused him of stalking Rory in Europe. Nate wondered how he would interpret his plans for college.

* * *

><p>"I gotta get ready for work." Dean nodded without another word after his reprimanding spiel and spun on his heel. He left Rory on the sidewalk out the front of his parents' house. He went inside and closed the door and didn't look back.<p>

Rory felt horrible, more horrible than she'd felt when she let the guilt fester inside of her across Europe. Having heard the consequences of their actions plainly laid out like Dean did seconds ago was painful. When he'd said he was an idiot, Rory decided that she was definitely culpable of the same. And she wasn't just an idiot. She was also a jerk.

Rory didn't think she had bailed on him but maybe she did. From an objective point of view, her actions steered toward that of someone who had fled the foxhole.

She ran away from her problems, all the way to another continent, while Dean stayed in Stars Hollow. Rory wasn't sure how long ago it was when he realised what occurred between them wasn't right, but she had acted as if there was nothing wrong. She had tried to bury her feelings for as long as her moral compass was capable. Dean was getting a divorce and Rory had moved on. Yup, that screamed jerk-like behaviour.

There was, at least, one bright ray to the dour depreciation of her day. Rory stopped blankly staring at the bunch of red balloons flying off into oblivion. She started her journey back home on foot. It was done. She was done. It had hurt her, along with a plethora of other innocent people, but she was finally permitted to call herself finished.

Rory had whipped out her cell phone. Everything was out in the open. What was done, was done. She felt bad but the paralysing weight that pressured her chest had lifted. She had dealt with Dean. Her love life wasn't as much of the steamrolled mess it once had been. Nothing was holding her back. Now, Rory and Nate could have a real relationship.

FIN.


End file.
